According to Taiwanese media Economic Daily, the price cuts of semiconductor chips are getting more and more intense, and the MCU, which was previously in short supply and soaring in quotations, also began to set off an avalanche of quotations.
Recently, MCU manufacturers such as STMicroelectronics MCU, Infineon, and Texas Instruments have all experienced a downward trend in quotations.
Following the market reversal of driver ICs, some power management ICs and CIS image sensors, MCUs have also begun to face pressure to cut orders and lower prices. Due to the shortage of chips last year, MCU, as the focus of the semiconductor industry, has been out of stock and prices have continued to increase, which has prompted related manufacturers to increase production. But this year, the global environment has been unpredictable. Due to inflation, war, interest rate hikes, and other pressures, the actual demand is not as good as expected.
In the first half of 2022, the supply and demand of new energy vehicles, industrial control, mid-to-high-end IOT fields, power management chips, microcontrollers, and other products are out of balance, driving the revenue of related companies in the semiconductor industry chain to continue to rise.
Industry changes due to lower end-market demand may ease in the second half of the year. With the introduction of policies to stabilize growth and promote consumption in various regions, auto sales have been boosted. In addition, the third quarter is an intensive period for the release of new consumer electronics products, which is expected to improve consumer electronics market demand.
MPU, another major focus of the semiconductor industry.
According to the latest report from IC Insights, total MPU sales are expected to maintain double-digit growth in 2022, nearly 12%, to a record $114.8 billion.
Total shipments of microprocessors rose just 3 percent this year. Compared to 2020, the ranking of the top five microprocessor vendors was unchanged in 2021, and their total MPU revenue value shipped last year increased by 15% to $88.3 billion. The combined market share of the five largest microprocessor suppliers in 2021 will reach 86.0% of last year's $102.7 billion in global MPU sales. The next five largest MPU suppliers, Nvidia, Samsung, UNISOC, HiSilicon, and NXP, together account for 4.3% of the 2021 total.
Statistics do not include coprocessors such as AI/ML accelerators and discrete graphics processing units (GPUs). Many application-specific system-on-chip (SoC) designs with integrated CPU cores also do not count toward the MPU ranking.